Safe and Healthy Housing

Safe and healthy housing is the foundation, framework, and focus of all our work.

Unintentional injuries in the home cause more than 21 million medical visits per year at a cost of more than $222 billion per year. Falls in the home account for $100 billion per year alone and each broken hip costs $65,000 on average.

Researchers have understood for decades that our homes can harm our health. Thousands of peer-reviewed studies have identified a multitude of health and safety risks in our homes that cause injury, illness, and death. Over the past decade, the body of scientific evidence has grown substantially, as scores of new studies have assessed a range of health and safety hazards in housing, identified sources and pathways of exposure, established dose-response relationships, and quantified risks.

Approximately 7 million U.S. children aged 0 to 17 have asthma, with poor and minority children suffering in higher numbers. Asthma persists into adulthood and accounts for $14.7 billion in direct medical costs plus $5 billion in other costs per year.

RTWC is one of the nearly 200 affiliates of Rebuilding Together, which focuses its work on programs counteracting those health and safety hazards present in affordable housing and preventing homelessness, hospital stays, and death. Virtually every project completed by each affiliate makes the home safer and healthier. Safe and healthy housing is the foundation, framework, and focus of all our programs and projects.

Rebuilding Together’s Safe and Healthy Housing mission focuses on 25 Health and Safety Priorities in home repair. Many of these repair priorities are simple and straightforward, like making sure homes have working smoke detectors. Other priorities require a wide range of skills and community partners to complete. RTWC does not have the resources to meet all 25 priorities at this time; we focus on immediate needs that help make the difference between homeownership and homelessness and between dependence and independence.